a. Field of the Invention
The present invention concerns methods and apparatus for determining whether to route an input (e.g., a message) to a system for further processing. The routing determination is based on a relevance between the input and the system. In particular, the present invention concerns methods and apparatus for determining whether to route a message (such as an incoming e-mail message for example) to decision systems (such as a rule-based decision system for responding to product inquiries or a system to schedule a meeting for example).
b. Related Art
Over the last few decades, the use of decision systems, such as rule-based systems, neural networks, expert systems, fuzzy logic systems, etc., to permit machines to make decisions formerly made by humans has increased dramatically. For example, such systems have been often used to classify or recognize a system input.
Unfortunately, as these systems are applied to ever more complex applications, their complexity may increase to such an extent as to become difficult to manage (e.g., debug, update, modify, etc.). For example, in a rule-based decision system, if the number of rules is relatively large (e.g., on the order of 1000 rules), changes to the rules of the decision system or adding new rules to the decision system often results in unexpected, unwanted, and difficult to diagnose, changes elsewhere in the decision system. Although decision systems based on fuzzy logic may be easier to implement and maintain, such systems are not appropriate for certain applications. In another example, although natural language processing decision systems generally work well when processing language in a particular topic, they generally do not work well when processing more general language. For example, natural language processors have difficulty interpreting the word "not". Although such problems have been acknowledged, they have, for the most part, been ignored.
Accordingly, there exists a need to simplify decision systems while, at the same time, permitting such systems to be used in complex applications.